Like So Many Dominoes
by Carnivorous Moogle
Summary: so we tremble, and break, and fall.
1. Snakeskin

The first time Lester wakes up, he stares at the gray-mint hospital ceiling, and inwardly unravels as he understands that this is not a dream.

Pearl is dead and he is a murderer and there is so, so much evidence, and if she'd just done as he asked and taken it back—

—he might have done it anyway, he realizes, as he stares into nothing and tries not to know what he is.

Eventually he falls asleep again, to the roar and clunk and rage of the washing-machine that he thinks he will hear for as long as he ever lives.

—-

The second time Lester wakes up, he feels someone staring at him, feels it like ice down the back of his neck. He opens his eyes to a familiar, calm, gentle smile, and friendly brown eyes that bite like a snake and look and look him all through and out the other side.

He huddles further into the white sheets. They don't lessen the cold at all.

"Hi, Lester," says the man whose name he doesn't know. Heck, heck, what was he thinking, risking everything on the advice of a man whose darn _name_ he doesn't _know—_

"What d'you want?" he slurs. They've had him on sedatives, apparently, judging by the IV bag and the fogginess of his brain.

The man leans forward in his chair. He is already perched strangely, like he always does, a bird ready to take flight at any moment. "I was thinking we could go for some coffee later," he says, in that grindingly calm, reasonable tone of his, "and then we've got some cleaning up to do."

"What, yer goin' to fix everything?" Lester spits. "Jus' like that?"

"No," says the man with the bowlcut. "I'm going to teach you how."

And then he is adjusting a needle stuck in the IV, and Lester feels like maybe he should say something about it, but he's so sleepy and it's such a small needle and geez, he just wants to go back to sleep, geez—

There is no accusing clunk and roar as he slips back into unconsciousness. There is only the snake in the man's eyes as it crawls down his throat and bites at his insides and promises to give him fangs, too, if he'll only just listen, if he'll only just be reasonable.

If there's anything Lester has always been good at, as a necessary survival skill, it's being reasonable.

When the nurse comes back in to start her shift, he is asleep, and there is no sign that Lorne Malvo was ever there.


	2. In All the Wrong Places

"Please open up," says Lester to the cheap wood face of the door to Room 223. "It's all gone real bad, an' I need yer help."

There is no answer, but he senses a sudden cessation of movement behind the door. "Is anyone there? Hello? Are you there," he starts, and stops short when he realizes he doesn't have a name to call.

He hesitates in the smoke-and-trash-smelling hall for a few seconds, shifting from foot to foot, and finally goes with "It's—it's me, Lester. Open up, we need to talk."

Nothing.

At least, not until he loses his patience and raises a fist to bang on the door again. Then it flies wide open, so fast that he nearly loses his balance; and there he is, the stranger with the silver-forked tongue behind his warm, wide, deadly-bright smile. The dim, greenish light of the apartment highlights the angles and hollows of his face, turning his already-dark eyes into black emptiness.

Lester takes in a breath, and another, and then he realizes that his fist is still in the air and he looks a real idiot, doesn't he. He tries to turn it into a wave, fails; lowers it to his side, is suddenly uncomfortably aware of how it's just sort of hanging there, settles for tucking it into his pocket (along with the other one, because now he's aware of it, too, it and its aching wound).

The man doesn't move or speak, simply watches. He's wearing his gray coat, but it's hanging open, his black shirt and pants visible underneath.

Lester glances up and down the hall, smiles quick and nervous. "So," he says, as brightly as he can manage, "c'n I come in?"

—

"Why'd you come here?" says the stranger, when Lester is seated on the edge of one bed. He'd taken it as a courtesy, seeing as there aren't really other seating arrangements, but now the man looms over him and it's doing nothing for his nerves. "You've got a home. Why not stay there?"

Because it's too empty and too full, he doesn't say. Because there's so much blood, rivers of it, it runs and puddles where the floor is uneven, and he can barely bring himself to think about it much less clean it up. Because he can't bring himself to go back on his decision not to stay with Chaz and his family, he doesn't say (with their innocent little home and innocent little glances and innocent little questions, and his innocent little brother saying _sometimes I tell people you're dead_).

"Because the police've been at me," is what he does say, "and I'm trying to lay low, y'know?"

"Good thinking," says the stranger, in the same dry tone as always. "Don't want them in your house any more than they have to be."

Lester hadn't thought of that at all. If the man could tell by the expression on his face, he said nothing about it. "Yah. Yah. An' I, well, seein' as you're about the only person in this darned town who's helped me when I needed it, I thought… well, I thought mebbe you'd help me again."

The man's eyebrows go up. "I shot the chief of police in your living room," he says calmly. "Maybe you should be a little more choosy about who you ask for help."

Lester's jaw clenches. He can hear the distant churning of the angry washing machine, his fingers tapping time with it on his forearm. "Darned sight more good than _he_ did me," he says, and instantly hates himself for how much he meant it (Vern had a wife, he had Ida and a little baby not born yet who'd never know his dad, but Lester is just so tired of calling and calling and no one come running 'til too late, 'til never).

"Hm," is all the stranger says. He turns and parts the blinds with a finger, looking out into the lamplit street below. "Lorne."

Lester blinks, breaking the surface of his self-loathing. "What's that now?"

"Call me Lorne." The man tosses something at him; it glints and jingles as it falls into his lap, and then onto the floor when he fumbles the catch. "Don't lose the key. I don't think the manager likes me very much."

Lester is dealing with a great many conflicting feelings right now, but he chooses to focus on relief. "I dunno," he says, chuckling nervously. "I'm always losin' stuff. Pearl's always telling me to get my head outta the clouds," and his throat closes up and he thinks, _no._

"I'll try not to," he corrects himself, and his voice is as calm and cool as the porcelain of his wife's coffin. "Thanks."

Lorne says nothing. He just stands at the window, watching. He doesn't look like he's planning to move anytime soon.

Lester doesn't bother taking off more than his boots and jacket before falling asleep, partly because he doesn't much like the idea of stripping down in present company and partly because he is too tired and numb and relieved to care.

Instead he drifts off, watching the stripes cast on the wall by streetlights through blinds, and the place where they are broken by Lorne's unmoving shadow, and the patterns where they crisscross his skin like the markings of a snake.


End file.
